The approximate solution of the Cauchy problem for second-order evolution equations is performed, first of all, using three-level time approximations. Such approximations are easily constructed and relatively uncomplicated to investigate when using uniform time grids. When solving applied problems numerically, we should focus on approximations with variable time steps. When using multilevel schemes on non-uniform grids, we should maintain accuracy by choosing appropriate approximations and ensuring the approximate solution's stability. In this paper, we construct unconditionally stable first- and second-order accuracy schemes on a non-uniform time grid for the approximate solution of the Cauchy problem for a second-order evolutionary equation. We use a special transformation of the original second-order differential-operator equation to a system of first-order equations. For the system of first-order equations, we apply standard two-level time approximations. We obtained stability estimates for the initial data and the right-hand side in finite-dimensional Hilbert space. Eliminating auxiliary variables leads to three-level schemes for the initial second-order evolution equation. Numerical experiments were performed for the test problem for a one-dimensional in space bi-parabolic equation. The accuracy and stability properties of the constructed schemes are demonstrated on non-uniform grids with randomly varying grid steps.
We introduce a positivity-preserving numerical scheme for a class of nonlinear stochastic heat equations driven by a purely time-dependent Brownian motion. The construction is inspired by a recent preprint by the authors where one-dimensional equations driven by space-time white noise are considered. The objective of this paper is to illustrate the properties of the proposed integrators in a different framework, by numerical experiments and by giving convergence results.
The paper analyses properties of a large class of "path-based" Data Envelopment Analysis models through a unifying general scheme. The scheme includes the well-known oriented radial models, the hyperbolic distance function model, the directional distance function models, and even permits their generalisations. The modelling is not constrained to non-negative data and is flexible enough to accommodate variants of standard models over arbitrary data. Mathematical tools developed in the paper allow systematic analysis of the models from the point of view of ten desirable properties. It is shown that some of the properties are satisfied (resp., fail) for all models in the general scheme, while others have a more nuanced behaviour and must be assessed individually in each model. Our results can help researchers and practitioners navigate among the different models and apply the models to mixed data.
In this paper, we address a way to reduce the total computational cost of meshless approximation by reducing the required stencil size through spatial variation of computational node regularity. Rather than covering the entire domain with scattered nodes, only regions with geometric details are covered with scattered nodes, while the rest of the domain is discretised with regular nodes. Consequently, in regions covered with regular nodes the approximation using solely the monomial basis can be performed, effectively reducing the required stencil size compared to the approximation on scattered nodes where a set of polyharmonic splines is added to ensure convergent behaviour. The performance of the proposed hybrid scattered-regular approximation approach, in terms of computational efficiency and accuracy of the numerical solution, is studied on natural convection driven fluid flow problems. We start with the solution of the de Vahl Davis benchmark case, defined on square domain, and continue with two- and three-dimensional irregularly shaped domains. We show that the spatial variation of the two approximation methods can significantly reduce the computational complexity, with only a minor impact on the solution accuracy.
This study focuses on the efficiency of message-passing-based decoding algorithms for polar and low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. Both successive cancellation (SC) and belief propagation (BP) decoding algorithms are studied {in} the message-passing framework. Counter-intuitively, SC decoding demonstrates the highest decoding efficiency, although it was considered a weak decoder {in terms of} error-correction performance. We analyze the complexity-performance tradeoff to dynamically track the decoding efficiency, where the complexity is measured by the number of messages passed (NMP), and the performance is measured by the statistical distance to the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimate. This study offers a new insight into the contribution of each message passed in decoding, and compares various decoding algorithms on a message-by-message level. The analysis corroborates recent results on terabits-per-second polar SC decoders, and might shed light on better scheduling strategies.
This work deals with the numerical solution of systems of oscillatory second-order differential equations which often arise from the semi-discretization in space of partial differential equations. Since these differential equations exhibit pronounced or highly) oscillatory behavior, standard numerical methods are known to perform poorly. Our approach consists in directly discretizing the problem by means of Gautschi-type integrators based on $\operatorname{sinc}$ matrix functions. The novelty contained here is that of using a suitable rational approximation formula for the $\operatorname{sinc}$ matrix function to apply a rational Krylov-like approximation method with suitable choices of poles. In particular, we discuss the application of the whole strategy to a finite element discretization of the wave equation.
Estimating human pose and shape from monocular images is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Since the release of statistical body models, 3D human mesh recovery has been drawing broader attention. With the same goal of obtaining well-aligned and physically plausible mesh results, two paradigms have been developed to overcome challenges in the 2D-to-3D lifting process: i) an optimization-based paradigm, where different data terms and regularization terms are exploited as optimization objectives; and ii) a regression-based paradigm, where deep learning techniques are embraced to solve the problem in an end-to-end fashion. Meanwhile, continuous efforts are devoted to improving the quality of 3D mesh labels for a wide range of datasets. Though remarkable progress has been achieved in the past decade, the task is still challenging due to flexible body motions, diverse appearances, complex environments, and insufficient in-the-wild annotations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey to focus on the task of monocular 3D human mesh recovery. We start with the introduction of body models and then elaborate recovery frameworks and training objectives by providing in-depth analyses of their strengths and weaknesses. We also summarize datasets, evaluation metrics, and benchmark results. Open issues and future directions are discussed in the end, hoping to motivate researchers and facilitate their research in this area. A regularly updated project page can be found at //github.com/tinatiansjz/hmr-survey.
While existing work in robust deep learning has focused on small pixel-level $\ell_p$ norm-based perturbations, this may not account for perturbations encountered in several real world settings. In many such cases although test data might not be available, broad specifications about the types of perturbations (such as an unknown degree of rotation) may be known. We consider a setup where robustness is expected over an unseen test domain that is not i.i.d. but deviates from the training domain. While this deviation may not be exactly known, its broad characterization is specified a priori, in terms of attributes. We propose an adversarial training approach which learns to generate new samples so as to maximize exposure of the classifier to the attributes-space, without having access to the data from the test domain. Our adversarial training solves a min-max optimization problem, with the inner maximization generating adversarial perturbations, and the outer minimization finding model parameters by optimizing the loss on adversarial perturbations generated from the inner maximization. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach on three types of naturally occurring perturbations -- object-related shifts, geometric transformations, and common image corruptions. Our approach enables deep neural networks to be robust against a wide range of naturally occurring perturbations. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed approach by showing the robustness gains of deep neural networks trained using our adversarial training on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and a new variant of the CLEVR dataset.
The accurate and interpretable prediction of future events in time-series data often requires the capturing of representative patterns (or referred to as states) underpinning the observed data. To this end, most existing studies focus on the representation and recognition of states, but ignore the changing transitional relations among them. In this paper, we present evolutionary state graph, a dynamic graph structure designed to systematically represent the evolving relations (edges) among states (nodes) along time. We conduct analysis on the dynamic graphs constructed from the time-series data and show that changes on the graph structures (e.g., edges connecting certain state nodes) can inform the occurrences of events (i.e., time-series fluctuation). Inspired by this, we propose a novel graph neural network model, Evolutionary State Graph Network (EvoNet), to encode the evolutionary state graph for accurate and interpretable time-series event prediction. Specifically, Evolutionary State Graph Network models both the node-level (state-to-state) and graph-level (segment-to-segment) propagation, and captures the node-graph (state-to-segment) interactions over time. Experimental results based on five real-world datasets show that our approach not only achieves clear improvements compared with 11 baselines, but also provides more insights towards explaining the results of event predictions.
Modeling multivariate time series has long been a subject that has attracted researchers from a diverse range of fields including economics, finance, and traffic. A basic assumption behind multivariate time series forecasting is that its variables depend on one another but, upon looking closely, it is fair to say that existing methods fail to fully exploit latent spatial dependencies between pairs of variables. In recent years, meanwhile, graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown high capability in handling relational dependencies. GNNs require well-defined graph structures for information propagation which means they cannot be applied directly for multivariate time series where the dependencies are not known in advance. In this paper, we propose a general graph neural network framework designed specifically for multivariate time series data. Our approach automatically extracts the uni-directed relations among variables through a graph learning module, into which external knowledge like variable attributes can be easily integrated. A novel mix-hop propagation layer and a dilated inception layer are further proposed to capture the spatial and temporal dependencies within the time series. The graph learning, graph convolution, and temporal convolution modules are jointly learned in an end-to-end framework. Experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline methods on 3 of 4 benchmark datasets and achieves on-par performance with other approaches on two traffic datasets which provide extra structural information.
Deep learning models on graphs have achieved remarkable performance in various graph analysis tasks, e.g., node classification, link prediction and graph clustering. However, they expose uncertainty and unreliability against the well-designed inputs, i.e., adversarial examples. Accordingly, various studies have emerged for both attack and defense addressed in different graph analysis tasks, leading to the arms race in graph adversarial learning. For instance, the attacker has poisoning and evasion attack, and the defense group correspondingly has preprocessing- and adversarial- based methods. Despite the booming works, there still lacks a unified problem definition and a comprehensive review. To bridge this gap, we investigate and summarize the existing works on graph adversarial learning tasks systemically. Specifically, we survey and unify the existing works w.r.t. attack and defense in graph analysis tasks, and give proper definitions and taxonomies at the same time. Besides, we emphasize the importance of related evaluation metrics, and investigate and summarize them comprehensively. Hopefully, our works can serve as a reference for the relevant researchers, thus providing assistance for their studies. More details of our works are available at //github.com/gitgiter/Graph-Adversarial-Learning.